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Thanks! Still learning where to look to spot the relevant things amongst all the UI clutter. This is definitely the most made-by-engineers game interface I have ever seen. edit: very cool, page sniping with an announcement of how dumb I am. 
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Feb 15, 2022 07:19
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Well, Gray, this ain't goin' so good for ya
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Feb 15, 2022 07:43
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The sky falls away, the land writhes. But you're still here. still here.
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Feb 15, 2022 07:53
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I see they decided schizophrenia was too fun to leave as an optional trait!
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Feb 15, 2022 08:09
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Oh, that's interesting. Cooking oil also has another relevant use in that it doesn't count as a vegetable/fruit-based potable liquid. It's very helpful in the edge case where you mutate into an obligate carnivore, though it tastes predictably awful so it requires a lot of boose to counter the morale penalty.
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Feb 15, 2022 12:16
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I think it’s probably a little early to be pulling out that factoid. On the other hand, I’m sorry, what?
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Feb 15, 2022 12:45
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The game is interesting but way too simulationist for me, is the a more streamlined fork you can recommend?
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Feb 15, 2022 12:58
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By popular demand posted:The game is interesting but way too simulationist for me, is the a more streamlined fork you can recommend? Some parts you can turn off simply as part of the base game, like if I remember right the whole "detailed nutrition" part is an optional toggle, and there are a lot of aspects you don't have to interact with, like vehicles and the more elaborate crafting bits(though you'll be notably more at the mercy of what you can loot). Because I like the simmy parts but trying to grok vehicles and the construction thereof gave me a screaming migraine.
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Feb 15, 2022 13:41
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There are only two currently maintained forks AFAIK, Dark Days Ahead, and Bright Nights. BN is a much newer and smaller project that aims to be a less simulationist version, but last I checked it was still mostly the same game without a bunch of the new cool stuff - sort of a time capsule of version 0.D with some new enemies. The main things it dumps are nested inventory and calories/nutrition. It also handles some spoilery content in a simpler way, but I'd rather not get into that here. Joke answer which is secretly the real answer: Project Zomboid habituallyred posted:I see they decided schizophrenia was too fun to leave as an optional trait! Portal storms are wild and I love them. We didn't even get to see much of this one. Schizophrenia has actually been renamed to kaluptic psychosis and has had some really great work done on it. We will be checking it out at some point for sure. worm girl fucked around with this message at 14:14 on Feb 15, 2022 |
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Feb 15, 2022 13:47
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Yeah shits hosed I love this game and come back to it about once a year to see what is new and whats going on. I like to turn on some of the options myself, mostly stat gains because honestly if you are making it you should get sharper, tougher, faster, etc just by surviving, you might start off as some rando, but honestly bashing enough zombie heads in is going to give you muscles.
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Feb 15, 2022 14:16
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I'm glad UndeadPeople's tileset and UndeadPeople (I think the dude went by SomeDeadGuy) himself is gone, dude was a major rear end. I love the story telling you're doing. I hope Earnest makes it. Flesh raptors are nasty customers! I tried CBN once. Honestly I didn't really enjoy it like CDDA. I like being able to just drop my backpack with all my items, then pick just it back up. (In older versions if you dropped your backpack, everything would fall out of the backpack.) Maybe I just like the sim aspect of CDDA a lot. Lady Jaybird fucked around with this message at 15:46 on Feb 15, 2022 |
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Feb 15, 2022 14:24
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dervinosdoom posted:I'm glad UndeadPeople's tileset and UndeadPeople himself is gone, dude was a major rear end. What's the drama there? I haven't heard of it before.
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Feb 15, 2022 14:50
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PurpleXVI posted:What's the drama there? I haven't heard of it before. He got really really really really tushy troubled that you can (Horrors of horrors!) change your gender midgame! Dude is majorly transphobic. In game (experimental only, I think) you can (e)xamine a mirror and change your look. Hairstyle, gender, and I think, skin color. Lady Jaybird fucked around with this message at 15:22 on Feb 15, 2022 |
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Feb 15, 2022 15:16
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What an absolute psycho.
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Feb 15, 2022 15:34
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That's advanced case of brainworms there, like that resident evil circumcision wiki admin.
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Feb 15, 2022 16:22
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The CDDA community was all  to the guy. It was nice to see.
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Feb 15, 2022 16:30
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dervinosdoom posted:The CDDA community was all As it should be Also really really, having transphobia in a game where last I checked You can turn in to a goddamn loving bear, or a lizard... or any number of other things
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Feb 15, 2022 18:49
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By popular demand posted:That's advanced case of brainworms there, like that resident evil circumcision wiki admin. That was the Silent Hill wiki
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Feb 15, 2022 22:34
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The funniest thing about the whole hullabaloo was that the crisis was sparked by devs "injecting transgender ideology" into the game, but the change had nothing to do with that. All that happened was that one of the devs was like, "Hey, there's a bunch of stuff that's solely cosmetic and no way to change it in-game, so let's just put a button on your character sheet to change it." There are no gender-diverse characters in the game and it's not like they added estrogen pills and striped socks, it's an OOC option for if you generate a random character and don't like the name or gender it gives you, or if you just wanna customize your guy for whatever reason. The DDA dev team is largely apolitical when it comes to community management. They have standard internet etiquette rules, but they don't try to convince anybody of anything and the game itself doesn't seem to be making any political statements beyond maybe presenting government and corporations as shadowy and possibly bad. The community is mostly gun nerds and people who like cheeki breeki memes, so I was surprised to see almost everybody being cool about it.  We leave Gray on the bench. They're in a bad way, and need help quickly.  Christ, what a mess.  They're still outside.  We grab some supplies. On the way down, we use the butt of our spear to smash these cheap shelves apart.  Gray slips in and out of consciousness as we work.   Gray found a screwdriver somewhere. We use it to take apart some of the benches for firewood. If you take things apart the right way, you don't waste as much material.  We set everything up in the stairwell. The brazier will keep us from burning the shelter down, but the smoke's going to be a problem. Out here it won't bother Gray too much, we hope. Even contained, indoor fires will produce smoke. This can hurt your stamina and make you cough a lot, which will actually start to do damage to your torso if it goes on too long. Choking damage. Currently, the smoke disperses a few tiles out rather than building up like it would in reality. When are we gonna get proper HVAC, devs? The green X is a firewood source, designated from the build menu (*). If we're within 6 tiles of it, we'll automatically take wood from it as needed to keep contained fires going. Firewood rapidly becomes obnoxious to keep up if you're trying to use it for anything more than brief cooking/crafting chores. Luckily we will get access to more efficient methods later.  We grab one of our two pots. The water's not running anymore, but the toilet tanks are still full of the stuff. It's kind of gross, but if we boil it long enough it should be fine. And hey, it's not like we're drinking out of the bowl. The fire's a bit warm, so we take off our sweatshirt and cowboy hat.  Gray wakes up and starts asking for water.    "Hey, slow down, that's still pretty hot!" "I need more. Is there more?"Well, it's good to see them walking around at least. Gray bled out so much that they got all the way down to severe hypovolemic shock, which is as bad as it gets. Hypovolemia means your blood volume is so low that it starts interfering with blood pressure, which is sort of required for your heart to work. Every second, there's a small chance you'll have a fatal heart attack and instantly die. Transfusions and IV fluids would help IRL, but those things haven't been added to the game yet, so you just have to drink water and pray. Being in shock tanks your stats and causes you to pass out occasionally. Obviously this can be very bad. Their condition has improved to advanced hypovolemic shock, so they're still very weak, but they won't just die on us. The massive blood loss also makes them anemic, but that's a secondary and less lethal concern. Their body will steadily turn iron into hemoglobin as long as they're not deficient. NPC needs are currently disabled, but that actually only applies to their standard hunger and thirst. Bleeding and other issues will still cause them to become thirsty or need nutrition, which is a good compromise.  Back upstairs, it seems like whatever craziness was going on has ended, though that creepy grass is still all over the place. It feels like we're hallucinating, but Gray saw it all too...  Ultica has actual sprites for the grass, if anyone wanted to see an artist's attempt at it.  We get back downstairs and decide we may as well boil all the water we have now. Gray watches us work and suggests we also boil the bandages they've been making. I would never have thought of that. We don't know the recipe for boiled bandages, but Gray does. Since we're allies, they share all known recipes with us automatically. This is incredibly cool. Boiled makeshift bandages don't staunch bleeding any better than the regular kind, but they provide better healing over time. For some reason they use up the boiling water, but we have easy access to more.  We were 25B back in Aghanistan. We patched ethernet cables, not wounded infantry. Gray's no expert either, but they seem like they've bandaged themself up enough to have an opinion about how to do it. They walk us through the process as we help change their wrapping. Bandages and antiseptic on wounds will degrade over time, especially if we get hit. Gray did a pretty poo poo job to begin with thanks to their tanked stats, and by now most of the bandages have fallen off. If we want them back on their feet sooner, we should be diligent about taking care of them. "Did you get hit at all?" "It got my arm, but it wasn't bad. Where'd that thing come from?" "Out of a zombie. It was all cocooned up, like a butterfly. It popped and they came flying out." "...huh. Did you see anything else like that?" "No. Well, maybe. There was one where her mouth opened all the way down to her stomach, and she was screaming, like she was calling the others." "So they're mutating."Gray just shrugs. The new information sparks our curiosity, but they look totally hopeless. We decide that staying productive is probably the best way to keep morale up. We have a problem: there are super fast flying hand-scorpion-butterflies, and we know the solution: armor.  We need some more firewood. We can't take the benches apart without light, but it's a slow process and we'd be spending fifteen minutes to gaing half an hour's light. Instead we use our hammer to smash a pipe flat on one end. We'll use this to take apart the cabinets upstairs, where we can use the light from the shelter computer's monitor. The makeshift crowbar is pretty crappy compared to the cudgel, but if you can't find a knife, it can be a decent starter weapon. It has 1 prying quality, so it can pry open wooden crates, but not doors or windows. We can also use it for non-destructive furniture disassembly. I eventually realized that I could have just used our hammer for all this as it also has Prying 1, but what's done is done.  The sun comes up as we work. These smashed windows are a security hazard, but we can just board them up with these benches.  The construction menu is searchable, but it's still a mess. There are like four kinds of windows that to my knowledge aren't used anywhere in game, and are all functionally identical. It's all JSONized so anyone can mess with it, but it doesn't get the level of attention that things like guns or monsters do.  We can further reinforce our window here, but this is just a quick job to block line of sight and keep zombies from wandering into our living room. These boarded up window frames won't block wind or smoke, so that could be an issue if it was especially cold out or we were trying to keep candles going or something. If we reinforce them, they become effectively airtight, even if the glass is broken.  With that done, we haul our firewood to the basement and sit down to read. Gray stares at the flames, saying nothing. We got very weary doing all that work. It didn't seem like much to us as players, but Earnest spent several hours disassembling furniture over a couple seconds of gameplay. This is one way that weariness sneaks up on players, and probably why it gets four brightly colored UI elements. If we tried fighting right now, we'd be at a massive disadvantage. Luckily reading doesn't burn any calories, so it doesn't increase weariness. We are mostly rested up by the time we finish our book, and we'll sleep off the rest A few hours pass. We share a meal of Foodplace's Food and pass out for eight hours.  In the morning, We cut a length of rag into a bandana and tie it around our face to protect from smoke. I was wrong about environmental effects! cddawiki.chezzo.com posted:Clothing offers the potential to protect the wearer from ambient field effects, diseases, or other ailments. Most of the listed effects have a range of 'Strengths' that they will compare against the wearer's environmental protection level. For instance, the influenza can affect a player with up to a strength of 3, targeting the mouth. The wiki is often out of date or just plain wrong, but this sounds authoritative. Thin smoke is strength 1, and smoke maxes out at strength 4. The bandana should stop us coughing sometimes, and may even keep us from getting the flu! The flu is incredibly annoying. The downside is that face coverings add a small amount of mouth encumbrance. It's negligible on the bandana, but if you're wearing an actual gas mask this can become a problem as mouth encumbrance affects stamina regen.  Of course the real reason I made the bandana was to raise our practical tailoring skill. We gained 3 ranks of theory by reading, but we will need to actually craft something to earn enough practical skill for today's project.  We start by whipping up a new shirt for Gray. Their old one was basically destroyed. We decide on a turtleneck since it's still pretty cold and we don't have any fasteners for a new buttonup. The hand-stitching is pretty bad, but the book showed us how to do it so that no one can see.  "How do I look?" "You don't look like Dexter anymore, so that's a good start." With that done, we both feel like we're ready to start the next project, a big quilted jacket.  And with that done, our nonbinary boy is good to go. The whole project took a couple of days and they seem to have recovered for the most part. We're starting to think we make a good team. Gray's the brawn and we're the brain. If this armor can really stand up to the fliers, we just might make it. Now that we've got the gambeson, we've turned a corner. This armor is by no means foolproof and it doesn't protect our head or legs, but our arms are what we block with and most hits go for the torso. The coverage on this thing is 100, so even though the flesh-raptor's attacks deal stab damage (and therefore we only have 4 armor against them), every single attack will be that much weaker. Weaker attacks means less pain and less bleeding, and that means we don't die to chip damage. We are by no means out of the danger zone, but we're a few links higher on the food chain.   Switching characters is a debug option that was recent(ish)ly added. It allows you to do things that logically should be possible, such as have your allies take care of you in an emergency instead of standing around obeying their questionable AI. While this does make the game easier, this is a sandbox simulation game with no endstate other than death. It's up to you to decide if this sort of thing should be part of your particular challenge. As for us, we're doing a collaborative roleplay kind of thing. Gray's our main character for the moment, but I don't see any problem letting our NPC allies shine in moments like these. We could probably have survived without switching by drinking dirty water out of the toilet tank and just hoping we didn't get sick, but this was cooler.  We honestly can't believe we're still alive. Earnest said something weird happened, that there were ghosts, and that it seemed like time got all messed up. We remember some of that, but we were also bleeding to death. That kid zombie we killed is still out front. It's a little charred, but not badly. With a blank expression, we start stomping on it until we're sure it won't get back up again.  There are more zombies out today. It's possible we've already killed these once before. We try a little archery and find we can hit the zombies reliably, but we're not getting kill shots. The cudgel works fine, and we take care to be thorough.  ...good to know. We'll be reeeeally thorough.  There's another crazy out here, probably for the same reason we are.  He throws a rock at us as we pepper him with arrows. We're too busy aiming to dodge, but our new jacket soaks up most of the hit.  We contemplate his outfit as we retrieve our arrows from his corpse.  Pulping corpses only takes a second, and renders them unable to reanimate. If they have a yellow ! sign on them, that means they haven't been pulped and are candidates for reanimation. You don't necessarily need to (s)mash a corpse to pulp it, if you blow it up with a bomb or shoot it with a .50 or something sometimes that will do it.  What should have been a clean shot turns into a science experiment. We stick two arrows in the brainless zombie, but it keeps just pacing around where it is, showing no reaction at all.  Eventually it bleeds out. We go make sure it's not getting up again, gather our arrows, and then get what we came for - water. We get it home and boil it - pond water isn't always safe to drink - and we're about to head out for more when we're startled by a noise.   Feeling bold or maybe a little suicidal, we apprach the invader barehanded and throw a punch. What follows is an awkward wrestling match. The zombie winds up with our arm in its mouth while we thump it in the gut over and over again.  Yeah!  Nerds belong in the locker.  We use the last of our cattail jelly cleaning up our arm, then address the locked door upstairs. Behind it, we find a ladder leading up to the roof.  Heyyyyy. We need to deal with the zombies at the mass grave to secure the immediate area. We head back down there, and spot another crazed human along with one of the reanimated zombies we took out yesterday.  He gets us right in the kneecap with a rock. gently caress Rocks have been a bugbear for a long time. They are SUPPOSED to do 7 bash damage, however when ferals first rolled out, rocks had been erroneously set to do stab damage. This meant they were bypassing early game armor and making people bleed all over the place. This fixed the damage, but then someone noticed that feral rock-throwers were always hitting, and almost always in the torso. was determined to be because monsters throwing rocks were in game code terms actually using a jury-rigged version of the gun system, and somehow their fake rock-throwing gun had incredibly good aim. One of the developers coded up a proper throwing system for the ferals, but then someone else came along and tweaked their stats because they were underpowered. This feral has a strength of 7, which if we assume 8 as the human average, should make them pretty crappy at throwing, but they've got 4 throwing skill. We don't have 4 ranks in anything! So why did he just do 1/8th of our leg's HP in a single throw?  Thrown objects do extra damage if they have a good weight:volume ratio, but it shouldn't be nearly doubling the base damage. It's possible the feral just got a crit here thanks to its high skill, but in that case it should be displaying a message - is there just not a string set for thrown weapon crits from enemies? In any case, that's why people complain about ferals. If you are reading this and you work on the game, solving this would probably make you an instant fan favorite.The solution on the player side is and always has been to armor up - ferals are an early game gear check. It's also important to note which weapon the feral is using. This one has an axe, which makes it pretty dangerous.  How do you like it, rear end in a top hat?! This attack is both a critical hit and a weak point. While we have potentially four layers of armor with durability, coverage, distinct protection values, etc., monsters don't have any of that. They can have armor, but it's just a flat value on their statblock that assumes 100% coverage on all body parts. This was annoying because something like a cop zombie with a bulletproof vest on would be completely immune to arrows. In the last year, weak points were added. Now, based on skill and luck, our attacks will sometimes hit monsters in vulnerable body parts which can penetrate armor or inflict special effects such as stunning or blinding them. This is especially important for archers and blade users, but here we see it stunning the feral. It would have been stunned anyway because we're using a cudgel, but we won't always have one.  We dispatch the feral, then drop our weapon and give the zombie a beatdown with our fists. It reanimated, but it was still pretty beat up from the thrashing we gave it yesterday. I take the opportunity here to train our unarmed combat to 1. Brawling's arm block technique requires that we have one point in unarmed, so this should help us a bit. Also note the skill rust on food handling and devices; I upgraded to a newer version of the game and it reset a bunch of options before I noticed. I disabled it, but we'll still need to shake that rust off.  Looks like the bride was packing. The feral's clothes aren't all covered in corpse gunk like the zombie's, and a rain coat might come in handy. We also grab her axe.  Axes are beastly. The move cost is very high - 139 vs our cudgel's 81, and no Rapid Strike to half that! - but in exchange we get massive cut damage and even a significant boost to our bash damage. This axe is damaged - at full durability it would do 17 bash and 34 cut - but it's still a great upgrade. The downsides? It weighs five and a half pounds, so we'll run out of stamina faster swinging it around, and its blocking ability is only medium. We trade defense for offense here, but note that the axe can also be used to pry open doors and windows, and with its high base damage it will get through armor better. The split damage means that if we hit someone, it will deal both the listed bash value and the listed cut value (filtered through our skills and stats as usual) to the enemy, just to be clear. It's not doing either/or like you might assume.  Things aren't too rowdy down here. As long as we pace ourselves, we should be OK. We take a deep breath and begin our approach.  Another one of these little fuckers. We need to be careful.  We try hollering, to see who notices. Note the Sound: 30 in the sidebar. Some actions, such as walking, fighting, shooting guns, smashing things, etc. produce noise. Noise is a numerical value that represents how far out the sound can be heard. Different monsters react differently to sound. In the case of zombies, they mindlessly approach it unless they can see an enemy, in which case they'll focus on that instead. We know shouting has a radius of 30, so we can use it to pull zombies away from the group and fight them one on one. Some enemies hear better than others. We can also hear, although in our case it's determined by our perception skill and any applicable traits. Having very good hearing is actually kind of annoying in this game, because you hear all kinds of sounds that aren't important.  As we hoped, this fool hears us and makes its way on over. It's the same one that bled out in the barbed wire the other day, and it looks like it's barely able to hold itself together. The :.... next to its name on the sidebar means it has only a sliver of HP left.    We repeat the process a few times, but unexpectedly, the pupating zombie reanimates and explodes again, violently birthing another flesh-raptor. We fumble for our gun and take a hit to our leg before we manage to get a shot off. A single squeeze of the trigger puts the horrible little thing down.  I pulled a boneheaded move here and accidentally picked up the magazine, which was inside of the gun, instead of picking up the gun itself. Then I had to waste valuable time picking the gun up and reloading it, which cost us enough time to get hit. That kind of thing can be run-ending, we got lucky we killed the flesh-raptor so easily.   We sit on a rock and wait around for the pain to subside. Two of the ferals, perhaps agitated by the sound of gunfire, manage to get themselves killed on the barbed wire. Ferals usually avoid traps they can see, I'm not sure why these two didn't. Maybe their fence was wide enough that their patrol AI couldn't find a path around it?  Another flesh-raptor swoops in.  It takes us three shots to get this one, but our armor protects us. No one can dodge bullets, but small creatures are harder to shoot. Those shots were loud though, we need to be ready.  We take out the remaining brainless zombie, then move in for cleanup.  Out in the field, we see see her again - that redheaded feral who had the spear, half-burned and shambling among the undead now. Ferals also zombify, as Earnest suggested. Her sprite's changed, but we know it's her because she's in the same area and cunning ferals always zombify into survivor zombies. Survivor zombies don't use weapons, but they have some armor, which can make them dangerous. As stated before, armor is an intrinsic value monsters have rather than proper gear. Even though we looted the cunning feral and burned up her stuff, her zombie has the same armor value as any other survivor zombie. I don't think this is worth fixing, but it can be important to know that this is how things work.  It's finished. We spend a little while looking over the corpse pile - most are so torn up or decayed that it doesn't seem possible they could come back, anything that looks whole enough gets the axe. The dead here are all wearing civilian clothes, but the casings we find are mostly .223 and .308 - probably military then. Hello! If you're Normal, the gun terms are probably starting to make your eyes cross. Here's a brief cheat sheet, please don't yell at me too much if you're a gun nerd and I got something wrong. .22 - .22 is actually like 4 different cartridges that aren't interchangeable, but are all the same width. 22lr is the most popular, and it is a lightweight, easy to use round with incredible range for its size. Armchair shooters like to poo poo on .22 for its low power, but most people die when you shoot them with just about anything, so show a little respect. .38 and .357 - These are two pistol cardridges that are the same size, .379 inches in diameter at the base. .38 is much weaker, but consequentially is quieter and has less of a kick. 9mm - This is one of the most popular pistol cartridges around, especially with police. It boasts good all-around performance, but can't deal with armor very well. It's the Mario of handgun bullets. .40 - .40 is basically 9mm but slightly better. It's another super popular round. Our Glock can actually hold either .40 or .357, which is pretty neat .45 ACP - .45 ACP is the gun nerd's cartridge. It has comparable performance to .357 and beats pretty much everything else above. The bullets are pretty expensive IRL though. .223/5.56 - These are the same bullet and casing with a different powder load. .223 is a hunting round, 5.56 is what the military uses for its basic assault rifles and light machine guns. This bullet is cheap, lightweight and has high performance for its cost. You can usually put a .223 round into a 5.56 gun, but not the other way around - 5.56 generates so much pressure that it can damage or even cause lethal accidents if loaded in a gun that can't hold it. .308/7.62x51mm - This is basically the same as the bullet above it, but better in every possible way. It's heavier and more expensive, so we here in the USA usually only give it to soldiers who have a more specialized shooting role, like sharpshooters. It's also what we use in medium machine guns. 5.56 and 7.62x51mm are standard for all NATO countries, so that we can trade ammo with our allies if we need to do any joint operations. .50 - You already know what this is. It's a comically huge bullet with a massive powder load. The rules of engagement actually forbid its use on infantry outside of extenuating circumstances, e.g. the enemy is in a car or a building (the bullets go through walls). Our military puts this in huge sniper rifles that need to pierce armor or go incredible distances. This bullet holds the record for longest sniper kill at 2.2 miles, which is bananas. You will probably notice JHP and FMJ when we shoot at stuff. FMJ is full metal jacket - the soft lead core of the bullet has a harder "jacket" of copper or some other metal around it. This means it goes through armor better. JHP is jacketed hollow point. These bullets have a divot at the tip that makes them mushroom out when they hit stuff. They do extra damage, but have less armor penetration. There are many, many other cartridges. If we wind up using one I haven't covered here, I'll talk about it there. I don't own any guns IRL and I don't know if I'd want to, but similar to cars they're a pretty neat feat of engineering if you can ignore all the unnecessary deaths.  With the immediate danger to our home removed, we spend some time looking around and find a camera among the carnage. It's hard to guess whether this massacre was justified or whether these were innocent people, but we snap a photo. At least there's some record of it now. Somebody witnessed it, and spared a thought for the dead. worm girl fucked around with this message at 21:12 on Mar 18, 2022 |
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Feb 16, 2022 01:16
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Snapping a photo of your friend next to various piles of horrific human corpses and viscera with an additional zombie. I'm sure that's one for the apocalyptic scrapbook.
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Feb 16, 2022 01:43
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I remember encumbrance being one of the more easily missed mechanics. You'll go along happy as can be then suddenly you keep missing every punch and zombies keep catching up to you, and it turns out to be because the game didn't deign to inform you that you hosed up your loadout and can barely move because of a poorly equipped sock or something. It's intuitive enough once you play a bit, but early on it's easy to miss that a number's suddenly gone red and is loving you over.
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Feb 16, 2022 03:07
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My favorite way to start is at a shelter, go outside, grab a rock, smash lockers until you get a pipe. Make a makeshift crowbar, smash down the door to the roof, smash the vent thingy. Go back downstairs and tear the curtains off of one of the windows, disassemble one long string into 6 short strings, make a makeshift hammer, then make a screwdriver. Disassemble a locker and with the sheet metal, make a brazier. Go back upstairs and disassemble the tanks to get 4 60L tanks, drag them to a water source, drag them back. Once that is done, set up the brazier, smash some benches for the planks, throw them on the brazier and start a fire. Then throw all of your tanks on top and if you wait long enough, they'll boil and you'll get tons of clean water.
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Feb 16, 2022 04:02
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I probably should have done that routine just to show it off as it's a great tutorial for new players, but I really wanted to burn Earnest's house down. As for encumbrance, yeah it's not intuitive at all at first. The game hits you with so much information and there's no way to know what to filter. I often hear new players say they don't want to take their bags off because then they can't loot, but like...just go back in with a bag after everything's dead. Thanks to a new update we can actually sew pockets onto certain items now. I haven't tried this yet but it may be possible to make an outfit that holds stuff and isn't too encumbering. worm girl fucked around with this message at 04:16 on Feb 16, 2022 |
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Feb 16, 2022 04:12
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worm girl posted:I probably should have done that routine just to show it off as it's a great tutorial for new players, but I really wanted to burn Earnest's house down. Well yeah, that's a part of the fun of the game. See that house over there? You can burn it down! Even attract some zombies to die in the fire too! Find a metal wall you can't get through? C-4! I love this game if you can't tell. You can even do the TCC forums of falling into a catacomb, lighting a torch, grabbing the nearest skeleton and yelling ...have you tried LSD? Lady Jaybird fucked around with this message at 05:24 on Feb 16, 2022 |
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Feb 16, 2022 05:22
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worm girl posted:I probably should have done that routine just to show it off as it's a great tutorial for new players, but I really wanted to burn Earnest's house down. The recently added nested inventory helps *so much* with that. Being able to just shrug out of a backpack without dumping evrrything is a huge i prove,emt.
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Feb 16, 2022 05:27
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 We wake up feeling mostly recovered from our wounds.  Yesterday, we saw some stuff up on the roof we can use. The standing tank breaks down into four individual sixty liter tanks. Each one holds like 16 gallons of fluid. if nothing else, we can use one of these for water storage. No more running to and from the pond. Notice the little thermometer icon next to Gray. That means we're too warm. This is due to the fact that we're wearing a leather corset under our gambeson. It's slowing us down by 2%, which I feel is acceptable. Taking off our hat and scarf wouldn't help as our head and mouth are just fine temperaturewise.   "Can we use this solar panel?" "Sure can. Right now it's powering the computer but if you bring me a wrench and some car batteries we can use it for whatever."Alright, so there's something to think about. We don't know if the subway tunnel heads north, but if it does, we can expect that the station on both ends will have some trouble. We need to be prepared for that.  Today we'll be heading to Steuben, looting a couple of houses, and scouting out the subway station. We can't see for poo poo in the dark, so we may as well make it a day trip. We gather our bow, axe, a bag, and some arrows, and head out. We're also packing the Glock 22. The Glock 22 doesn't use .22, it uses .357. .357 is the same size as .38 and fits in the chamber, but it can't be fired out of the Glock 22. It can also use .40. Guns are cool.  We found some vitamins on one of the ferals the other day. Our diet has not been great and isn't likely to get better, so we'll remember eat one or two a day. multivitamin posted:Essential dietary nutrients conveniently packaged in pill form. An option of last resort when a balance diet is not possible. Excess use can cause hypervitaminosis. I'm not actually sure what the number ranges mean. Do the pills have randomized vitamin values? Or is that the number if I down the whole bottle or something? Who knows. Iron is obviously important and we're probably pretty low - our hemoglobin count is back up, but that came at a cost to our iron reserves. Depending on our diet we might run into trouble with the others. Vitamin A can get low if you're living on junk food or vegetables, vitamin C is often problematic if you're mainly eating meat and grain. Hypervitaminosis isn't coded yet. It's famously a survival concern for people who eat polar bear livers. There are no polar bears in New England but it's probably something that could come up if you had a weird enough diet.  We find a newspaper page stuck in a bush. Looks like this is from a couple weeks ago. We imagine Grampa reading an article like this and his head just exploding.  We spot something we hadn't anticipated when we reach the first houses. zombie soldier posted:Once a soldier, it is dressed head to toe in combat gear and carries itself rather steadily for a zombie. Our arrows are not going to be able to hurt this thing. It's wearing thousands of tax dollars of armor designed to stand up to AKs and shrapnel. It's doubtful our Glock will cut it either. The axe, on the other hand...  As we creep closer, we notice an open window, with what look like stairs down to somebody's basement. We don't know what's down there, but it could be a good emergency escape route. Always have a plan for running away. Zombies are dumb and have short memories. If you can break line of sight and get away, they'll give up quickly.  Our flashlight is dying, but there's nothing hiding down here. We'll keep it in mind.  They start to close in, but we're ready. We splatter the first zombie and knearly knock the soldier off its feet.  We're having a little trouble with our axe. It's heavy, and every miss is a costly mistake, but we only need to hit the soldier twice more to drop it. More are coming, but the biggest threat is out of the way.  One of the zombies jumps on us. We stumble backwards, kicking at it. It comes free, but in the process our jeans are completely destroyed. We stop to catch our breath before destroying the corpses. That was only a few enemies and it brought our stamina to the danger zone. Any lower and we'd be in a lot of trouble. We could have used our gun if we got too exhausted, but that much noise in a densely populated area like this is a bad idea. I'm annoyed about the jeans because having pockets was useful.  The soldier had some interesting stuff on him. The clothes and armor will have to be cleaned, but the grenades are especially tantalizing. He didn't have a gun. Maybe he dropped it when he died? MREs are military rations. Way better than the one's we've been eating. They contain all the same sort of stuff you can see in this video, and the extras can come in surprisingly handy. It makes me unreasonably happy that they're able to simulate the usefulness of something so mundane in this game. Grenades can be great, but they're also inherently dangerous to the user. It's easy to whiff a throw and blow yourself up, so we won't use one without practice. (future worm girl note: "She's lying.")  The USA ballistic vest, seen above, is a bulky kevlar vest worn on the outside of your clothes. The vest has solid ceramic plates inside of it that are astonishingly good at soaking up gunfire, even from high-powered rifles.   The way this works is that the vest has a base armor value and each plate adds a massive amount of armor, but with small coverage. This vest is missing two plates (one ESAPI front or back plate, and one ESBI side plate) so the coverage only totals up to 41. With the other two plates we'd be at 82 coverage with 25 bash and 50 cut and ballistic protection. "Holy poo poo," you must be screaming, "That armor is so good! Why wear anything else?!" The answer is that 82 coverage isn't actually very good, and 50 points of armor is massive overkill most of the time. The vest is very heavy and prevents us from wearing many other types of armor, and if we're getting wailed on by five or six zombies who do six or seven points of damage per attack, we'd rather have a lighter outfit with more reliable coverage. This armor is still good, don't get me wrong, and there are plenty of situations where it's very good. Any time we're dealing with gunfire, I'll probably be reaching for the ballistic vest, provided we find some plates to replace the missing ones. The combat knife is one of the best weapons in the game if you have the stats for it. We don't, but it's lightweight, quick, and does very good stab damage. At high skill/stat levels it basically melts armor and spam attacks so fast nothing can deal with it. The entrenching tool is a cute little shovel that is also a decent bash/cut weapon. Great for finally breaking out the Death Korps of Krieg cosplay now that there's no one left to mistake you for a nazi.  We clear out another pair of zombies, catching a deep bite in the process. Luckily we immediately find some alcohol wipes in this bathroom. Cattail jelly got taken out of the autolearned recipes, which means we don't know how to make it anymore! Proper antiseptic can be annoying to find, but there are still things like these alcohol wipes lying around. The wipes have only a 30% disinfection chance, but there are enough here that we can just keep wiping 'till it's clean.  We take an aspirin and a calcium tablet as well. We should take a break and explore the house.  That is so much better! We have to use the debug menu to remove our beard. Shaving is hardcoded, so while it's possible to add in cosmetic effects, it would be kind of a pain in the rear end. Someone will get around to it I'm sure.  There is a ton of great stuff in here, but no wrench. We also find a bunch of preserved food and a box of toast-ems.  In a big cardboard box we find a book about archery that includes enough bowyery diagrams to make pretty much anything we need. That heavy composite bow looks sick.  We could loot houses all day, honestly. It's fascinating rooting around in people's stuff, thinking about their lives and who they were...but we should check out the subway station before we get too bogged down in urbex. We cut through a forested lot and take a look.  There are some zombies up north, but it's pretty quiet here. We put a couple stragglers down with our axe, keeping away from the big pack near the intersection.  The soda machines are all smashed up and empty. That was probably the rioters, unless zombies drink soda.  We take the stairs down toward the platform and immediately bump into many angry zombies. Without our flashlight we can't get a headcount, but it sounds like a lot.  They lose interest as we mount the stairs and flee toward daylight. We are not going back down there without better equipment. It won't take us long to better prepare. We're now at the point where our injuries are a little too much to ignore, so we take some time to haul our loot home. We head back out, this time to do some more looting in the areas we've cleared but haven't searched.  Half a zombie. It painstakingly drags itself forward, glassy eyes fixed on us like it's going to accomplish anything.   We fight our way past another couple of zombies and into a house we passed earlier. Finding the basement empty, we flop down on the couch and lie there, dizzy with pain. Eventually we decide to listen to some tunes on the mp3 player.  Music boosts your morale, which can really help focus when you're working on a project. The mp3 player has headphones, so we don't need to worry about alerting any zombies. Basements (assuming they were empty to begin with) are usually safe places to sleep. The chances of a zombie randomly wandering in are very low, and you can make a little noise without bringing the whole neighborhood down on you. If you pick the nomad trait at chargen (which penalizes you for staying put for too long), a good strategy is to just couch surf in basements.  Eventually, we get hungry enough to raid the fridge. The power's been out for two weeks now and we're immediately assaulted by the astringent smell of rotten fruit and moldy pizza. Bummer. Will we ever have pizza again? The oranges look good. We grab those, the pine nuts, and some yogurt. Some food has a health + or - indicator. This affects a hidden stat, Health, which controls how fast we heal and how strong our immune system is. Being hurt, poisoned, doing drugs, and some other stuff really does a number on your health. It's pretty easy to stay at neutral if you eat right, but being healthy enough to enjoy a bonus is a lot of work. This system is slowly being phased out and replaced with more comprehensive under-the-hood mechanics.  We drink the beer too, what the hell. We've been getting our rear end kicked all day, a little alcohol takes the edge off our pain. Beer gives us the tipsy, depressant, and painkiller effects. Currently the first two aren't doing much, but if we drank a lot we'd start becoming drowsy and clumsy. Drinking too much can make us sick or even kill us, but having a beer now and then is fine.  In a box in the corner we find a survival kit - somebody's bug-out bag, or maybe it's for camping? There's a Pocket Survival Guide inside.  We almost ditch it as it's a pretty low-level book, but it's got a couple recipes we didn't know, and it's always handy to have a reference. It looks like cattail jelly and the other survival recipes that used to be autolearned were moved here. Oh thank you God we needed these.  We loot some more food, a pair of leather pants, a couple books, a backpack, and some other odds and ends. We also find tramadol, which sounds like a pretty good time. After getting it all home, we flip through a copy of US Weekly until bedtime. Tramadol is a slow-acting opioid painkiller. It's not the most useful one to have in a fight, but it's much more powerful than aspirin. It is possible for us to get hooked on painkillers, but only through regular use, and if we stop as soon as the addiction starts it's relatively easy to shake. The addiction mechanics are very outdated and bad, and some of them were flat out broken last I checked. US Weekly raises our Social skill to 1. It only requires 3 intelligence to read, which is pretty amusing. Take that celebrity gossip culture!  We awaken with a dark craving. "Hey are those corn dogs still good?" "They're corn dogs. They've never been good."This bag has two uncooked(?) corn dogs in it. They had about a week's worth of shelf-life left. It's like 60 degrees F down here. Has anyone ever seen an uncooked shelf-stable corn dog that came in a bag IRL?  We hold the dogs over the open flame like campfire weenies until they look done. We offer one to Earnest, but he turns away in disgust. Earnest has the Junkfood Intolerance trait. He can eat junkfood, but it gives him a big morale penalty and he doesn't get as much nutrition from it.  We spend the day reading and healing up. We'd love to take advantage of the full moon, but we're just too tired. When it's Very Dark, we're pretty much blind. However, full moon nights (when it's not cloudy) are as bright as it can be while still being classified as Dark. We have pretty complex night vision calculations involving our perception, eye encumbrance, and whatever else, but zombies are stuck with a flat 3 tile radius as long as it's Dark or darker. That means that when it looks like this outside, we can see them, but they can't see us. If it was even slightly brighter, they'd see as well as they do in daytime.  We take a trip out to the pond to fill our 60 liter tank with water. We see a cute frog.  yeah  We set our tank of water over the brazier to boil, then head back out. This sapling looks about right.  We smash the young tree down and get three long sticks for our trouble. If we smooth one of them out, it should make a good weapon. A great weapon. High blocking ability, rapid strike, +2 to-hit, and 26 bash damage for 114 moves. It's two pounds lighter than the fire axe and shares the sweep ability. The quarterstaff is just ridiculous, and if you're struggling with the game, go make one immediately. edit: As of 3/4/2022 the quarterstaff's damage was reduced to 18. It is still a very good weapon if you have enough strength to buff the damage, but if you don't, consider working toward the shillelagh, which has a high base damage and is pretty easy to make. This feels great, and we can use the spear strap we got off of that feral woman to carry it around. While the axe left us open after attacks and wasn't suited for fighting groups, the staff should hopefully give us the speed and defense we need to handle the subway station.  We also take a moment to carve a plank into a washboard. We combine this with a scrub brush to make a washing kit, which we can use to clean up filthy items. Earnest seems incredibly relieved by the idea of clean laundry. He has the squeamish trait, which means he simply cannot wear filthy clothes. We can, but it gives us a big morale penalty.  We decide to make a deluxe fried egg sandwich. That's two eggs fried in bacon grease between two crackers with onion, parmesan, soy sauce, and butter. Mmm... The crackers are actually shelf-stable bread from the MRE, but this is still an abomination. Some recipes let you use all kinds of different ingredients (so you can have rice or barley in your soup, etc). This mostly works fine but I really think someone ought to give sandwiches another pass.  Earnest watches in horror as we eat 1424 calories of oily egg mess.  The water still needs to boil a little longer, so we knock out some stretches. Training is a new thing you can do. Training tasks often require special tools or instruction books (such as a breadboard for electronics) but are really great for learning, especially if you just need to catch your practical knowledge up to your theoretical. They can also teach you proficiencies. In this case we'll be training athletics, which is currently only used for swimming, but should eventually encompass jumping, climbing, and other tasks. Additionally, we have a hidden stat called cardio. Our cardio gets better if we burn enough calories every day, and it gets worse if we don't. Your cardio affects your maximum stamina and the rate at which you become weary, as well as your recovery rates, making it enormously important for pretty much everyone. Survivors tend to lead ridiculously active lives, so it's something most characters will probably naturally grow into.  Back at the station, not much has changed. We drop our bag, our strap, and our scarf. We're wearing a filter mask, which we hope will deal with the zombie smell in the tunnels.  There's a zombie waiting for us at the foot of the stairs. It grabs us, but we remember to sweep the leg. Then we can just jab at it until it dies. Stairs don't always line up to the same x and y coords as the level above, particularly on older maps. When that happens, enemies have a lot of trouble figuring out how to path to you across z levels, which can cause them to get clustered up at the stairs if you run away and try to come back. That means we want to try to kill the zombies quickly - there are 6 stair tiles upstairs, but they all put us on this particular tile, and if it gets totally blocked in it will be hard to proceed.  AZAB! Zombie cops aren't as armored as soldiers, but they can still be a problem sometimes. They often have good gear, so remember to loot them. This one has an expandable baton, cargo pants, and a first aid kit, which are all pretty solid. The baton is worse than our quarterstaff, but it fits in a pocket and can be used with martial arts like krav maga, if we ever find a manual or a trainer.  Something huge comes out of the dark. It's a walking corpse, cartoonishly bloated and reeking worse than any of the others. We try to bat it away.  ITS EVERYWHERE AAAAGH Boomers aren't as scary as they were in L4D. In melee, they can barf on you, which has a chance to temporarily blind you if you're not wearing eye protection, but otherwise it's just a weak zombie. When you kill them, they pop and spray bile everywhere, which doesn't do anything besides make a bit of noise. Fighting is already loud, so...meh. There are other enemies that do what the boomer does but better, but I still think these guys could use a rework.  We step outside for some air. There are a few zombies in the street waiting for us, and we find a few goodies on them. I love the early game slow drip of random ammo. We also found about twenty .38 rounds earlier. There's something neat about getting ready for an expedition and trying to figure out which gun to take based on its damage and how much ammo you have. It makes you use stuff you'd normally never consider. This 9mm fits our pipe rifle and while that thing sucks, we're down to like two .40 rounds.  For whatever reason, of the zombies hurls itself through the plate glass window of an art gallery up the street, setting off the burglar alarm. This really stirs up the horde, and they all shamble over to investigate the sound.  A couple of them wander over, and one of them is carrying a shotgun. Heyyyyyyy. Shotguns are devastating up close. Buckshot (AKA 00) is treated as a single high-energy projectile if you fire it point blank, which is great for punching through armor. This falls off if you're even a tile away from the target, where it is instead treated like nine individual projectiles with about the power of a .22. That's still great for unarmored targets, but not so much if you're shooting at something really scary. Slugs exist though, and those work like somewhat worse rifle rounds. All other shotgun shell types are stupid gimmicks that suck and no one should use them, with the exception of dragon's breath rounds. Fire is incredibly dangerous in this game and a lot of enemies simply can't deal with it. Overall, shotguns are pretty versatile and do more damage than handguns, but they suffer from high recoil, low rate of fire, and poor ammo capacity.  Despite our amazing find, we can't help feeling like a stupid rear end in a top hat. Why does Earnest get to sit at the shelter while we're out here swimming in zombie guts?!  The zombie soldier wanders over and we beat on it for a while. Unlike the axe, our staff isn't good enough to just brute force it, but we can trip it and juke on it all day.  The loot is WILD. Another grenade, a first aid kit, some winter gear, cigarettes, and A loving ASSAULT RIFLE.  OK, it's technically a carbine. The M4 is the gun that replaced the m16 as the primary infantry weapon for the US army and marines starting in 2010. It's basically a lighter, shorter, more modern version of the same gun. The M4A1 is a variant that has a stronger barrel and no burst-fire option. This baby can only do single-fire or full auto. As you can see, it has solid damage and decent armor piercing. The recoil is relatively low (this affects how long it takes us to re-aim after firing), and the range is better than anything we've seen so far. Dispersion is what it sounds like - how much the bullet goes off track. The first number is the gun's base dispersion and represents an absolute value of how inaccurate the gun is. If a perfect robot shot it exactly the same way every time, it would still have some dispersion. The second is our stat modifier. Lower dispersion is better, so as you can see, we're blind and clumsy enough to pretty much double the gun's dispersion. Sight dispersion is affected by the sights installed on the gun, with the second number again being from our stats. Currently it's just got the built-in iron sights, we could probably put something on there that would be better. Dispersion and sight dispersion are both taken into account when firing, and this is all affected by range. We're no sniper and maybe we never will be, but at medium to close range we should hit stuff just fine. While our shotgun does better damage and is (for us) a bit more accurate, it only holds 5 rounds and shoots much slower than the rifle. I don't like the m4 for exactly this reason - once you have one, you have to find excuses to use anything else. The devs are aware of this and have been working to make m4s and 5.56 less prevalent, but it's still pretty much the meme weapon everyone tries to rush. We can affix a combat knife to the M4 as a bayonet, but IMO the knife is better used on its own, as the M4 is heavy enough that it will chew through our stamina if we try. The grenade is just too tempting.  ENOUGH IS ENOUGH  I HAVE HAD IT WITH THESE MOTHERFUCKING ZOMBIES  IN THIS MOTHERFUCKING TUNNEL   We don't hear or see the explosion downstairs, we're just suddenly deaf.  As we stroll away from the scene of the blast, looking for somewhere to rest up, a pair of real actual wolves emerge from the forest and start nipping at our heels. It almost defies belief.  We're in bad enough shape to be worried about them, but adrenaline's high and we're getting pretty good at clubbing things to death so they can't bite us. Unfortunately we've also got three zombie dogs, a cop, and a couple more regular zombies en route. I guess they heard the explosion.  We light up a cigarette and survey the carnage. Eventually our ears stop ringing. Time to head back down.  Our flashlight illuminates the devastation. One or two of them are still alive, and as we go in for the kill something bizarre happens. One of the remaining zombies starts puking all over the floor, splashing out legs with burning fluid. We manage to put it down and stare down at the corpse, astonished. There's a smell like sour chlorine coming off of it that burns our nostrils, even though the mask. Meet the acidic zombie! It's a normal zombie, but it bleeds and barfs acid. If you're standing in an acid tile, your legs take damage every second. This adds up incredibly quickly, especially if you're slowed down by pain. Combined with grabs, this can rapidly become very, very deadly.  We realize smashing this thing apart would splash more acid all over us.  We come back with a knife. If we're careful, we can chop it up without getting burned.  We finally make it down to the train platform. Our flashlight reveals a few zombies, but right away we see that the tracks do indeed stretch northward, toward the refugee center... worm girl fucked around with this message at 19:26 on Mar 5, 2022 |
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Feb 17, 2022 02:38
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Basements can be fun surprises, anything from barren holes, to organized workshops, to makeshift shelters, to cluttered storage spaces where you have to crawl over old furniture to get anywhere to... places full of surprises that you run away from very fast. When it comes to weapons, I always had a fondness for the various replica ren faire weapons you can find. Though you have to check them carefully before using them, otherwise you get a surprise that can really ruin your day when you're counting on a two-handed sword to chop a zombie in half... I forget, can you clean filthy equipment you get off zombies or is it permanently tainted by cadaverine?
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Feb 17, 2022 11:53
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PurpleXVI posted:I forget, can you clean filthy equipment you get off zombies or is it permanently tainted by cadaverine? magically washable Zombie Funk and/or just takes soap/water and a heavy dose of End-Of-Days gallows humor to get the stink down to a bearable level?
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Feb 17, 2022 12:17
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Its a good thing that computers can't reproduce smells with all the various types of decaying and barfing corpses around.
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Feb 17, 2022 12:23
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You forget to say that shotguns are really loud too. Tough to kill zombies faster than you attract them, especially with wandering hordes.
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Feb 17, 2022 12:29
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I like a nice solid baseball bat as a weapon, they are very durable and decent for crushing zombie skulls.
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Feb 17, 2022 15:23
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Bats are very nice, you got to find them though. Cudgels and quarterstaves can be made by the dozen. I almost always have a cudgel or staff on me, just in case I'm rocking a metal weapon and an electrical zombie gets close.
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Feb 17, 2022 16:28
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This game and Unreal World are two of my favorite games to play when I just want to do something not too hectic, they're so unique that there's really nothing else like them. Can't wait for the day when we start crafting all sorts of weird stuff.
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Feb 17, 2022 17:06
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PurpleXVI posted:I forget, can you clean filthy equipment you get off zombies or is it permanently tainted by cadaverine? There's a screenshot of us doing laundry in the last post. The filthy tag is removed with a washboard (or sponge, scrub brush, or rag for hard items) plus some water and soap, and then the item is totally clean. I've heard that it 100% does not work that way IRL, but maybe the characters are just used to the stink and don't mind as long as the clothes aren't visibly stained. It would be funny if boomers and other situations could make the player's clothes filthy, and you could block that effect with raincoats or hip waders where appropriate. habituallyred posted:You forget to say that shotguns are really loud too. Tough to kill zombies faster than you attract them, especially with wandering hordes. True! The shotgun we found is about twice as loud as our glock. With a faster gun it can be less of a problem that you're drawing attention by shooting, but shotguns are so slow that inviting more friends to the party is usually pretty dangerous and all but guaranteed. Grenades have the same problem, as we just saw.  Our leg is covered in acid burns and the pain is exquisite. We fend off the nearest zombies, then head back to the ticket office and heave ourselves into the security guard's chair for a rest. There are papers scattered everywhere - cash, old files, and some computer stuff. Earnest might appreciate having a laptop. We also find a couple of handwritten notes. survivor's note posted:5 gallons of water, 3 cans of chicken, 3 cans of soup, 14 9mm rounds. GUNSHOP -> CHECK GARAGE -> CUT THROUGH YARDS -> HOME survivor's note posted:Look for pink berries, blue flowers. They're in the same handwriting. Another survivor? Who were these notes for, and where are they now?  A storage closet has been left unlocked. Inside, we find a bunch of heavy-duty tools. Jackhammers, kilns, a Sawzall, and a cordless impact wrench. This stuff looks pretty useful. There's also a map of the tunnels!  The map shows two bits of subway - a long straightaway north of our current location, and a separate bit of tunnel to the northeast. If they're connected, it's at a point past where the map shows. Still, even if they aren't, that northern tunnel goes somewhere, and it's bound to be closer to the center than Steuben. It's time to get Earnest and move camp. Once we're feeling better, we'll head on up the tunnel together.  We take out another zombie as we limp home. The fastest I ever hit this without some kind of exploit was day two. I've heard of people getting 500 in their first week but I have to assume they're starting with combat skills and gear or something.  We get back to the shelter, treat our wounds, and pass out. When we wake up, Earnest has made breakfast.  "Here you go, toad in a hole." "This is eggs in a basket." "What? No. It's toad in a hole. Nobody calls it eggs in a basket." "It is absolutely eggs in a basket, what the gently caress are you talking about? Toad in the hole is like a baked bread thing with whole sausages in it. And it's THE hole, not A hole." "Since when do you know anything about food? I saw that abomination you called a sandwich the other day."This goes on for a while. It is not toad in a hole!!  As we start to pack, we realize we'll probably need to leave our books behind. Earnest shows us how to use our e-reader to scan them, allowing us to bring digital copies along instead. The little tablet uses batteries, but it's very efficient and there are batteries everywhere. Hands-down one of the coolest new features. Books are bulky and heavy, now you can carry every recipe and skill book in the game in your pocket. You can't store just-for-fun books in the tablet yet as the game treats these as limited-use so that your character can get bored of them and e-ink tablets don't have that functionality, but I'm sure someone will fix that sooner or later. It takes us about two hours to scan every book we have.  We use our permanent marker to label the tablet. It's not so much that it might get stolen, but that we don't want it to get lost in the loot.  Home, such as it is. We drag the corpses out to the street. It won't help much as the smell of death has soaked into this place already, but at least we don't have to look at them. We didn't have to leave much behind in the end, and certainly nothing irreplaceable. The plan is to rest here another night and make up some medical supplies, then push north in the morning.  Down in the tunnel we work by candlelight, hammering together a few planks of wood to make a simple sled. If we put a box on it, we can store our stuff inside and drag it along with us for the long walk north. Our introduction to the vehicle system is to build the simplest possible vehicle - a one tile box we can drag around with the (G) key. We could put wheels or whatever on it, but we can't steal car or bike wheels without a wrench and wooden wheels would take way too long to make.  Indigenous Americans around the great plains used to make these. Ours is pretty shoddy, but it only needs to go a couple miles. The box we made gives us about 37 liters of volume. Not bad for one morning's work. Here's an example of two guys making one, though hearing them mispronounce it is killing me. You can actually do it without nails as they have, but we don't have enough cordage. I believe if we put a seat on it instead of a box, Earnest would actually ride in the seat and let us drag him around like a mule. We will not be doing that.  The tracks are too high to get the travois over them, and there's no way we'd get it all the way up the stairs without taking it apart first. We probably shouldn't get too attached to this thing.  We decide to check out the art gallery while we're here. "Would you say this is modern or postmodern?" "It's the vaporwave statue standing between two toilets. Let's leave." "I would say that it is postmodern." We do a little looting and gather some cattails for cattail jelly. At one point during a fight, Earnest accidentally pokes us with his spear and we spend the whole rest of the day being mad about it. You can (a)ctivate funnels to catch rainwater when it's properly raining (not just drizzling), which can be useful if you're stuck somewhere with no water. You still have to boil rainwater and I though this was stupid until I stayed at a cabin IRL and we had to boil all our water because it was rainwater.  We pack up the MREs, medicine, blankets, a laptop, and water, and some odds and ends, and leave the rest in a pile for later.  "Hold on, I need to go to the bathroom." hee   Something we first mistake for a dog moves in the shadows at the edge of our flashlight, but a primal part of our brain knows better. Too many brown legs, wiry black hairs, and little beady eyes like black glass. It's a spider, impossibly huge and just wandering around the tunnel like it owns the place. It doesn't appear to notice us. Can spiders hear? How well can they see? We share a look and continue on. A man comes barreling down the tunnel and actually hisses at our flashlight. As he draws closer, we see that he's not rotting, but something is absolutely wrong with him.  feral troglobite posted:This person is still alive but completely crazed, changed by something they are exposed to down here. Their face is dominated by unnaturally large, faintly glowing eyes and needle-sharp teeth poking through their lips. They remind you of something out of a campy monster movie - and of the good times when underground cannibals were less of a real concern. HOLY gently caress ITS A CHUD  The mutant jumps on us, trying to get to our flashlight, but Earnest runs it through with his spear. His expression is hidden by his bandana, but his eyes betray regret at the sight of the mostly-human corpse.  The guy came at us Donald Ducking it, and what clothes he does have smell like sewage. He had a baggie of brown powder tucked into one of his socks, and we decide it is better left alone.  We spot some kind of ooze along the tracks and are about to comment on it when another tunnel mutant howls a challenge and hops across the tracks toward us. They seem to know how to avoid agitating the spiders. I have no idea what that message about the ooze means. I've never seen it before. This time our quarterstaff does the job, and we leave the mutant where it falls. "There were rumors going back months about homeless people disappearing. Is this what happened to them? They came down here and...what, turned into morlocks?" "Maybe they're like the crazy people on the surface." "The rumors go back farther than the riots. I don't know, it's..." We notice a bunch of the spiders in this part of the tunnel are dead. We're about to comment on it when Earnest shoves us out of the way and something leaps in between us. unseen horror posted:There was nothing here a moment ago, but now you see the faintest outline of an otherworldly creature approaching you with jittery leaps. Trying to focus on it reveals a pointed beak dripping translucent fluid and rows upon rows of bladed legs grasping the floor, before your eyes begin to burn and your head starts to spin. The air seems to shimmer as the nearly invisible creature attacks. There's a stabbing pain in our chest and our vision goes blurry. We shove it off and blindly stumble forward, swinging our staff, but it's gone.  "I think we won."We did not win.  Whatever it is, it fights like the bone bats that almost killed us, skittering in for a quick bite before darting away. It opens a big gash in our side and almost immediately we feel blood hot blood running down our leg. Adrenaline kicks in and we lunge forward, swinging wildly and driving the monster toward the wall. At first it seems hopeless, but our staff finds purchase and we feel something snap under the weight of our attack.  Again and again we strike, knowing in the back of our mind that if the creature can escape for another ambush, we'll probably bleed out. Eventually it starts to come apart under our blows. At first we fear it's escaping, but we move forward to grab it and feel it...dissolving? "Hey. HEY! HEY! Can you hear me?!"Earnest is shaking us. We blink, realizing our mind has been elsewhere. He's applying a bandage and seems to have mostly stopped our bleeding. "Whuh, did I black out?" "No, you just stopped responding after you killed it. I practically had to drag you back to the sled."I love this game. I have never run into that creature before. It applied an effect called "inattentive" when it stabbed us with its beak which greatly reduced our perception. At one point it went all the way to 0. I'm glad I didn't try to use my gun there.  We're not even halfway there and we've already seen four new horrible kinds of things that exist now.  hunting horror posted:This is some sort of great viperine creature, possessed of a curiously distorted head and massively clawed appendages. It partially supports itself with the aid of black, rubbery wings of monstrous dimensions. Its form writhes and changes before your eyes, filling you with unnameable horror.  We grab our handgun and squeeze off several shots. Earnest keeps getting in the way, but we manage to hit the creature a few times despite the fact that it's writhing around so erratically. Hunting horrors have the HARDTOSHOOT flag, which used to make things really difficult to hit unless you had a shotgun. Eventually shot difficulty was changed to be based on size, and now the flag just makes them count as half as big as they are, with shotguns offering no special bonus. Hunting Horrors are man-sized, so even with our middling skill and poor stats we're able to tag them if we aim carefully and they're not too far away. That last one is a problem - they're extremely fast and can zoom in for an attack and then fly out past the edge of our flashlight radius in the time it takes us to sight one down and get a shot off. Our accuracy decreases if they're further out, and it's hard to guarantee that we'll have full aim when one is nearby. Aim, see, works in degrees. If we press (f), we can just press (f) again to take a snap shot immediately, but that's usually a waste of ammo. Instead, we pass turns by pressing (.) while aiming, which increments our aim counter as long as we stay on-target and don't get knocked over or something. We can also press (p) to automate the aiming process. We aim faster the more skill and dexterity we have, and we aim slower if we're slow or our hands and eyes are encumbered. Getting max aim usually takes about 3 seconds but we're getting slower every time we get hit thanks to pain penalties. 3 seconds is already an excrutiatingly long time when you're fighting something this fast. Recoil, if you were wondering, is the amount our aim counter ticks down if we pull the trigger. Low-recoil guns stay on-target better. That doesn't matter here because we keep having to move to get around Earnest, so we lose our leftover aim anyway. Hunting horrors also have the NOHEAD flag. Guns currently only crit on a headshot (this is slated to be changed), so we're not going to get lucky here. Lastly, they have no armor, but they do have the PLASTIC flag. This means that all incoming bash damage is randomly cut to either half or one quarter. Our staff isn't a high damage weapon to begin with, and these guys have almost 300 HP. This is probably the worst situation I've ever faced one in, and there are two. We're under-armored, we don't have a blade with us, we're already hurt, and our partner's AI doesn't know the meaning of the word retreat. Even if it did, there's not really anywhere to run to. We're in a straight, narrow tunnel with no doors or stairs to duck behind. We could kill the light, but they hunt by scent (more on that later). So it's do or die time.  We fire until the mag is empty, then drop the gun. Next up: the M4.  Sticking with single fire, we manage to kill the first one, but we run out before we can put a scratch on the second. The biggest problem here is Earnest. We can't order him to fall back, and he keeps dancing in and out of the line of fire, which interrupts our shots and wastes valuable time. It doesn't help that the horrors swoop in and out of melee to attack.  We lob a grenade down the tunnel, trying to time it with the monster's retreat. It's somewhat successful, but we're in bad shape here. Grenades are a lot less impressive than they are in other games. Creatures near the epicenter of the blast take damage from the overpressure, but farther out it's all just shrapnel. Shrapnel is calculated as a lot of little tiny hits, and monsters are great at ignoring that kind of thing.  PIIIIPE RIFLE  Earnest for gently caress's sake MOVE  We run out of ammo at the final moment, but Earnest gets a lucky stab in and ends it. The creature flakes apart and melts away as it dies, leaving no evidence it was ever here. 7 map tiles down, 105 to go  Earnest has lost a lot of blood. We decide to scout ahead while he rests. The tunnel's clear, so as long as he doesn't walk into a spider he should be fine for now.  We find a great pool of acid and a gigantic slug oozing more of the same. It's locked in battle with another tunnel mutant. slug posted:A disturbingly large mutated slug as large as a human. Venom drips from what must be its mouth, and it is covered with sticky mucus. experimental mutant posted:A deformed mutant in a torn jumpsuit looking at you with insane hatred. Their skin is a chaotic mix of scales, fur, and chitin, and their fingers end in long talons.  The mutant howls for blood. As we watch, acid-charred skin sloughs away revealing a new and entirely different arrangement of fresh scales and fur beneath. The mutant is regenerating! We decide it's time to retreat to the station for now. It's very tempting to press on. Our health is OK-ish, but we're in a lot of pain and having exhausted all of our usable ammo, we no longer have a panic button. We can see that the mutant's AI knows to retreat when it's injured and take advantage of its regeneration, and in our current state we can't keep up with it. It would easily wear us down.  Driven by unknowable buggy instinct, or maybe just sensing weakness, one of the spiders suddenly rushes us as we head back. Its little fangs have some trouble with our gambeson.  We manage, barely, to fend it off, but it gets several bites in. We can barely stand on our leg and it's only seconds before we start to feel an itchy, burning pain all over. We shove a bunch of cotton balls up against our largest wounds and slump against the travois. Jesus christ look at our stats! Poison is bad news and for the most part there's no real antidote available. It debuffs our stats, causes periodic pain and other nasty effects, and occasionally does damage. This poison is a general type rather than a wound-based type, so the damage it deals affects our torso even though we mostly got bit in the leg and foot. The best we can do is apply bandages and antiseptic to our torso, which doesn't make a ton of sense, but maybe we can picture it as an abstraction for general supportive care in the absence of a more complex medical systel for now. Cellar spiders, or Pholcidae, are the subject of a common urban legend that states that they actually have the most potent venom of all spiders, but don't or can't bite humans. They're very small and unagressive in real life and no medically significant bite has ever been verified, and recent research suggests that they actually have very weak venom for a spider their size. That's lucky for us.  Something snaps us awake. When did we fall asleep? gently caress. SPIDER I tried to squeeze in a nap to deal with out pain and bum leg here rather than trying to cross spider country again. You heal about twice as fast while sleeping and if we'd managed eight hours our leg might have been out of the danger zone. Alas.  "gently caress gently caress AAAAH!"We smash the spider and decide to limp the rest of the way back to the station. They're not particularly aggressive, but trying to camp down here would just make us an easy meal. We're going to need to rest for a day or two. Earnest is mostly fine, but our leg has several bite wounds that have begun to stiffen as they heal. It doesn't look like it's at risk for infection, but we're not going to be able to walk on it if we don't let it heal up a bit.  We're out of ammo, but now we realize that Steuben has not one but two gun stores in the same intersection, and one of them is next door to the cemetary. The social commentary writes itself! The tunnels are hell, but they're also interesting so I want to press on for exactly that reason. RPwise, we've made a plan and committed to it, but if the thread overwhelmingly wants to back out and give up on the subway we'll try the overland route instead. worm girl fucked around with this message at 03:46 on Feb 18, 2022 |
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Feb 18, 2022 03:30
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Is there anything to the subway besides a linear gauntlet of monsters? I didn't see you mention any loot or terrain features.
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Feb 18, 2022 03:46
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Mzbundifund posted:Is there anything to the subway besides a linear gauntlet of monsters? I didn't see you mention any loot or terrain features. There can be good loot down here and there are some interesting things to find, but we've been a bit unlucky. I like to use the tunnels to move around large cities because they're usually much quieter than the surface, but it looks like some new and more dangerous content has been added since I last played.
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Feb 18, 2022 03:51
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I knew those subway tunnels were a magical land, all kinds of rare creatures seen already. I'm sure the pain's a small sacrifice.
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Feb 18, 2022 04:10
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2 hunting horrors this early, and you survived!  I'm glad you didn't meet another subway denizen. Sludge crawlers! gently caress them I warned you about subways bro! I told you dog! CHUD use to be, or actually might still be in the game. I've fought them. I've also cleared 1000 zombies in under a week with a non combat survivor start  its hard, real hard.Edit: I just learned that if you wear a fedora you can activate the fedora to tip it 
Lady Jaybird fucked around with this message at 04:30 on Feb 18, 2022 |
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Feb 18, 2022 04:17
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I warned all of you about the subway tunnels, now look at us. Thank you for playing this game for us OP, I'd have quit several times over by now and miss out.
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Feb 18, 2022 07:43
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Any chance you’ll do a run of the Bright Nights fork?
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Feb 18, 2022 08:37
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